Thank you for the reply. That is interesting.
Today, I tried again and surpridingly, I was able to work with Eclipse Mars + m2eclipse maven plugin for eclipse + eclipse-embedded maven.
Basically here is my findings:
1. I had issues when creating new project using m2eclipse. The error is like 'connection refused'. This is even if the proxy is already set into the maven setting.xml.
2. No issues when I use an existing project already. I click 'Configure' then choose something like 'convert to maven project'. This made the pom.xml and eclipse work together, e.g. when pom.xml is edited, the project is rebuild automatically.
In summary, I only got the issue when creating a new project using the m2eclipse plugin and choosing to create based on an artifact (
pattern).